There is and there will continue to be a natural affinity between democracy and economic well-being. We saw throughout the book that wealthier societies, on average, are also more likely to be more democratic and to be able to protect human rights better. We also saw that countries that make a transition to democracy under conditions of relative wealth are highly unlikely to reverse their democratic achievements. This is a comforting and often reinforced narrative about the world that creates a certain set of expectations among people who live in countries without democracy, wealth and/or good records of human rights protection. The coupling of economic abundance and individual freedom has repeatedly raised expectations in the post-war boom period of economic development, the period of decolonization, the third wave of democratization, end of the Cold War and during the prolonged Arab Spring since 2011. On the one hand, expectations have been raised that periods of successful economic development will naturally lead to democracy and better human rights protection. On the other hand, expectations have been raised that periods of democratic transition will naturally lead to better economic development and human well-being. The problem with the general finding of a strong relationship between economic abundance and individual freedom is that there will always be exceptions. A telling contrast can be seen between the 2012 US Elections and the 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress. One country is extremely wealthy with a faltering economy and relatively high levels of individual freedom, and one country is becoming wealthier with a rapidly growing economy and relatively low levels of individual freedom.
Expectations in both countries are high for their new leadership as both populations desire economic abundance and its many associated benefits.
But President Obama himself admitted after the election that democracy is
‘messy’, while many commentators on Chinese political affairs argue that the regime will struggle to control the desire for freedom as it continues to enrich larger proportions of its society.
In the Middle East and North Africa, the economic critique was coupled with a political critique, which led to regime change and call across many groups and many countries for democracy. But what if the newly constituted
regimes of the region are not able to address the question of economic development and the demands of their disproportionately youthful populations? And what happens to the promise of democracy and human rights if agents in the new regime are equally responsible for violating human rights as we have seen in the case of Libya? The vision, fortitude and achievement exemplified by Bachelet, Rousseff and Aung San Suu Kyi runs the risk of being stifled by the adverse and unpredictable events in this region and others undergoing complex processes of transition. President Obama is the first US President to visit Burma, which bodes well for the opposition movement and the National League for Democracy, but will the reforms implemented by the regime go far enough and fast enough to meet and fulfil popular expectations about democracy and human rights? Will a post-Assad regime in Syria be able to represent the different factions in Syrian society and how will the abuses of the regime, the war and the opposition be dealt with in ways that create hope for the next generations?
Beyond these cases and countries, there remain the multiple challenges associated with ‘the bottom billion’ for whom the type of regime under which they live arguably makes very little difference to their daily lives.
Marginalization, social exclusion and global inequality have pushed just over one-seventh of the world’s population into a level of poverty that limits their ability to take part meaningfully in their societies. Regimes come and go, but their daily struggle for subsistence remains. If commentators like Thomas Pogge and Paul Collier are correct, then the distribution of wealth has gotten worse not better over the last 30 years and that for this group of people, poverty has deepened. We saw that inequality interacts with power and under certain conditions is intimately related to the violation of civil and political rights as the ‘haves’ have incentives to use coercive means to exclude access to wealth for the ‘have nots’ (see Landman and Larizza 2009). For many, poverty and inequality on the scale evident within the bottom billion represent ‘structural violations’ of human rights in which access to the basic services of the state is extremely limited if not simply unavailable and satisfaction of people’s basic needs is not being met. The problem with structural violations is that it there are no ‘perpetrators’ just victims. Land tenure patterns, policies that exclude and lead to inequality and the power relations inherent in the global economic system make it difficult to find culpability and more importantly long-lasting solutions. The persistence of the bottom billion and its potential for expansion coupled with human rights violations present significant challenges for the growth of democracy in the world.
democracy and human rights
Many commentators think that democracy and human rights are different sides of the same coin and that advance in one necessarily brings advance
in the other. Conceptually, the two share a commitment to well-being and a set of principles around accountability, representation, transparency, participation and inclusion. Empirically, analyses have indeed shown a positive and significant relationship between the two across large samples of countries and time. At both the conceptual and the empirical level, however, there are certain challenges to the naive view that ‘all good things go together’. Conceptually, democracy and human rights share certain features, while other features remain quite distinct. Where democracy offers political accommodation, spaces for deliberation and negotiation and the possibility for peaceful resolution of conflicts, human rights are grounded in a strong moral discourse and fortified through the rule of law, which has a particular judgemental and ‘adjudicative’ way of resolving disputes and finding particular actors and parties in breach of their legal obligations. This judgemental, adversarial and confrontational orientation of human rights, while motivated by a shared set of principles, can sometimes be at odds with democracy and its ability to find common ground between and among contending groups.
While there are many studies in political science and international relations that demonstrate the positive and significant relationship between democracy and human rights (Landman 2005a), it is vitally important to understand that such a relationship is very far from perfect. It was popular at the end of the last century to identify the problem of ‘illiberal democracy’
as a trend among transitional countries that had managed to establish basic democratic institutions, hold several free and fair elections and guarantee at least the chance that the opposition could win power while at the same time fail to provide protection for a wide range of different human rights (Diamond 1999; Zakaria 2003; Landman 2005a). This ‘human rights gap’
is a significant challenge not only for the new and restored democracies in the world but also for the old and established democracies. The nature of precariousness developed in this book is one that affects all societies, and defenders of human rights need to remain vigilant in all political contexts.
Explanations for the gap include weak state institutions and the failure of a human rights culture to grip national consciousness in ways that inculcate human rights values throughout societies.
The post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ demonstrated how quickly long-fought and long-held commitments to human rights can be undermined through appeal to external threat and the priorities of national security. Democratic publics are quick to rush in legislation that centralizes executive authority and provides legal means to subvert rights protections at national and international levels. The international community roundly condemned the Bush Administration’s rewriting (or reinterpreting) of international law in ways that justified the use of extraordinary rendition, the detention of
‘enemy combatants’ and the use of ‘intensive interrogation techniques’
such as waterboarding (Blakeley 2011). The election of Barack Obama in 2008 led many to expect a reversal of such policies, which by and large
has happened, but in their place, President Obama has increased the use of targeted assassination carried out primarily through drones and remote warfare, which many believe runs afoul of international law. In late 2011, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which codifies into law indefinite military detention without charge or trial. The provisions in the act authorize the president to order the military to pick up and imprison people who are captured anywhere in the world indefinitely. The use of such practices sends strong and contradictory signals to both allies and enemies of the United States in ways that continue to undermine human rights and limit the ‘soft power’ (Nye 2005) of the world’s democracies.
Waves and setbacks
Analysts engage in ‘pattern recognition’, and one of the hallmarks of the last four decades has been the growth in democracy around the world.
Where this growth can be characterized and catalogues in the different
‘waves’ or not does hide the fact that since 1974, both the number and percentage of countries that are democratic have grown significantly.
Any observation of this nature, however, rests on a particular definition of democracy and such counting of democracy typically adopts a thin and ‘procedural definition’ that focuses on elections and the existence of basic democratic institutions. We can thus celebrate and be somewhat triumphant about the democratic achievements that have been made since 1974, as well as the democratic inspiration that they have spread to countries that have not yet experienced democratic transition. Indeed, now with the advent of new technologies, democratic diffusion not only takes plays among contiguous countries, but the images and narratives associated with the struggle for democracy today can transcend barriers to information that in the past have been more fortified. Pro-democracy movements can observe, learn and absorb lessons from other political contexts and adapt them to their own circumstances in ways that challenge incumbent regimes and make possible democratic advance. The availability and use of social media are thus new factors to take into account in explaining the spread of democratic ideals and the potential for protest mobilization against non-democratic regimes.
Against the positive trends in democratization captured in the quantitative analysis and the hopes that such trends create, there is a wide range of remaining challenges to democratization to which we all must remain aware. The advance of democracy evident in the quantitative figures (see Figure 1.1) is of course for its most minimal features. Experience from a large number of democracy assessments that have taken place since 2000 suggests that there are ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ features in any democratization process (IDEA 2008: 288). The easy achievements are those which occur
relatively soon after a democratic transition and key examples are as follows:
Obtain a broadly agreed constitution with a bill of rights
Establish some sort of office of ombudsmen and/or public defender
Hold free elections and establish universal suffrage
Support the revival of local government
Ensure the protection of basic freedoms such as party association, press, speech and assembly
The more difficult challenges in democratization processes are as follows:
The effective inclusion of minorities and women’s participation
Equal access to justice and protection of the right to life
Meaningful intra-party democracy
Control of executives
A reduction in private influence and private interests in the public sphere
A significant role for opposition parties
The experience of many new and restored democracies around the world has been one of either ‘delegative democracy’ (O’Donnell 1994) where executives disregard the constitutional limits on the exercise of their authority, or ‘rollback’ (Diamond 2011) of democracy where executives centralize their authority and undermine democratic values and institutions as well as human rights commitments, as in the case of Russia under Putin and the Central Asian republics of the Former Soviet Union since the mid-1990s. In addition to these challenges, there are long-term questions around elimination of so-called ‘authoritarian legacies’, access to justice, combating corruption, party finance, freedom of information laws and parliamentary oversight of executives, the security apparatus (military and police) and, in many countries, the extractive industries and foreign direct investment more generally (IDEA 2008: 300–2).